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LIVERPOOL TO REVAMP RETAIL FOR 800TH BIRTHDAY

BY SUSAN THORNE

The Paradise Street project will extend from the waterfront to the downtown.

Liverpool, England, home of the Beatles and a championship soccer team, could soon be equally well known as a shopping destination.

Plans are afoot to expand and revitalize the city’s retail core with a 2.5 million-square-foot, £800 million ($1.3 billion) mixed-use development project on a 42-acre site that was approved by the Municipal Council last September. This project, called the Paradise Street Development, will add 1.6 million square feet of retail gross leasable area, plus hotel, residential and office facilities on a site that overlooks Liverpool’s harbor on the west side and extends eastward to the downtown shopping area. The developer is London-based Grosvenor, which is financing the entire project out of its own pocket. (Grosvenor is a private company owned by the Duke of Westminster, said to be Britain’s wealthiest citizen). A development agency called Liverpool Vision is coordinating public and private interests related to the project, and the city will retain ownership of the site. The builders expect to complete the project in 2007, the 800th anniversary of the founding of the city of Liverpool.

“We’re really attracting attention because of the scale of the project and the fact that it will have an open street configuration rather than being an enclosed shopping mall,” said Rodney Holmes, Grosvenor’s retail projects director. Grosvenor intends to support and enhance Liverpool’s existing retail and downtown core by integrating new construction into the city center and protecting heritage structures (Liverpool has some of England’s finest Victorian buildings). The development will retain 90 percent of the existing street layout and incorporate such historic buildings as Bluecoat Chambers, an 18th-century school.

“Our approach is to grow upon what the city has,” Holmes explained. Liverpool now has a healthy but small retail district about one-quarter mile long.

“There are some good retailers there — Next, Gap, Marks & Spencer and Zara, for instance — and some of them have very high sales per square foot,” Holmes said. “But the range is very limited, and there is little investment. There is little depth of middle- and upper-price offerings, so the young and affluent tend to go elsewhere to shop.”

Holmes estimates the potential regional market catchment at about 4 million people, with 720,000 in the immediate city area and 1.2 million within a 30-minute drive.

Liverpool civic authorities identified retail in the late 1990s as the sector most likely to extend tourist visits and inject new energy into the downtown, said Chris Morland, city of Liverpool project manager for the Paradise Street Development Area, or PSDA.

“But retail has been changing, and one obstacle to growth in our downtown was the lack of the larger rental units which many of today’s retailers want,” Morland said. The new development will provide such premises, including two large department store structures. In all, 22 new two-to-six-story buildings will be added.

Sensitivity to the city’s overall character was clearly important in the city’s choice of developer. Shortly before giving Paradise Street the green light, Liverpool officials rejected a rival scheme by the locally based Walton Group to develop a retail-entertainment complex in Chavasse Park near the waterfront, a project that would have competed with downtown businesses. Grosvenor will preserve Chavasse Park as green space and add other public spaces as part of the PSDA.

The project’s master planners, Manchester-based Building Design Partnership, or BDP, will use several architects, its own and from other firms, each of whom will design a different part of the site.

“The architects can bounce ideas off each other,” Morland said. “Variety is important. The public is more sophisticated and wants different things nowadays.”

Terry Davenport, a BDP architect and its director for the project, said building materials will vary too, ranging from brick and terra-cotta near the downtown to light gray Portland stone in the west. This close attention to detail is part of what Davenport describes as “knitting into the grain of Liverpool’s fantastic heritage character.” He adds, “Our approach is one of place-making within a city, not imposing design on it.”

The participating architects will coordinate their efforts, however.

“We’re going to have buildings that talk to each other — new structures that take other buildings into account,” Morland said. “So you could have a streetscape that creates views to the Liver Building [a waterfront landmark], for example, or to the two cathedrals.”

Other English cities, such as Birmingham, Cardiff, Leeds, Manchester and Nottingham, have radically revamped their downtowns, and Liverpool has a particularly strong need to follow suit. The city, an important trade center from the 19th century into the 20th, declined after World War II when its port operations moved downriver. Economic malaise set in during the 1970s, and the city’s population dropped from 610,000 in 1971 to 457,000 in 2001 — the highest such exodus of any British city in the period, officials say.

Things have begun to turn around over the past decade, however. Liverpool was one of the only large English cities to achieve strong job growth in the late-1990s. Such projects as Princes Walks (a 1 million-square-foot hotel, office and residential project on a former wharf) and Rope Walks (an area of historic warehouses renovated as a nighttime destination) are reviving other districts. And the PSDA promises to be the most important initiative to date, its proponents say.

“It will be fantastic for the city,” Morland said. “This will be a big catalyst in driving the city of Liverpool and making other things happen.”

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